Sex Toy Fools Entire Chinese Village

The discovery of a double-headed sex toy mistaken for a mystical rare fungus brought national notoriety to a Chinese village and TV program this week.

Villagers from Liucunbu, a rural community outside western Chinese city of Xi’an, encountered the sex toy while drilling a new well shaft. Hard-pressed to identify the flexible, fungi-like object, perplexed residents alerted the local news station, which immediately sent reporter Yunfeng Ye to the scene.

In her coverage of the finding, broadcast last Sunday on the station’s investigative journalism program Xi’an Up Close, Ye thoroughly probed different aspects of the discovery, interviewing locals and inserting her own research on the alleged mushroom. Despite Ye’s earnest reporting, her and the villagers’ obliviousness of the object’s real identity has now lent itself to national amusement.

The report opens with Ye proclaiming the discovery of the mysterious object, the likes of which “not even an 80-year-old local man has seen.” Villagers crouch around the object, floating innocently in a water-filled bucket. “It has an eye and a nose, but we don’t know what it is,” says a man who was among the drillers who discovered the sex toy.